“We Give Up Living, Just to Keep Alive”: Three Essayists on Health Care Decisions

11/14/24 • 52 min

The scope and intensity of health care products and services available today make it necessary for us to have thoughts about how much of our way of life we would be willing to give up for them. Finding the balance that works for people is a daunting task. They feel the gravitational pull of health care providers and related industries, and they face the pressures family, friends, and cultural attitudes and expectations can put on them to use all the health care services available. We consider this subject as three essayists thought about it. The essayists are Barbara Ehrenreich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Michel de Montaigne. We identify some of these forces and discuss how the essayists reacted to them in their writings.
Primary Sources:
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer; Twelve, 2018.

Emanuel, Ezekiel J. "Why I Hope to Die at 75." The Atlantic, Oct. 2014.

de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame, introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Everyman's Library; Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Links:

Website for the Hartford HealthCare Elevate Health “series of 1-minute informational segments about health topics” heard on Connecticut Public Radio.
The recently-published novel from which the last audio clip was taken is Blood Test, written by Charles Baxter and published in 2024 by Pantheon Books. Russell Teagarden's blog piece on novel.
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Montaigne’s essays covering his thoughts on doctors and health care services.
Ezekiel Emanuel’s website.
Ezekiel Emanuel’s 2014 article in The Atlantic (behind paywall).
Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on news show where he updates his position on how he manages his health care.
PDF of Montaigne’s collected essays (Project Gutenberg)

The next episode will feature Luke Fildes’ painting, The Doctor (1891) with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Toronto, Canada. Here is the link to the painting from the Tate Britain Museum in London, England. We will focus on how the painting has been viewed as a work of art and how it has served as an ideal of medicine when it was created and since.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].

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Emanuel, Ezekiel J. "Why I Hope to Die at 75." The Atlantic, Oct. 2014.

de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame, introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Everyman's Library; Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Links:

Website for the Hartford HealthCare Elevate Health “series of 1-minute informational segments about health topics” heard on Connecticut Public Radio.
The recently-published novel from which the last audio clip was taken is Blood Test, written by Charles Baxter and published in 2024 by Pantheon Books. Russell Teagarden's blog piece on novel.
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Montaigne’s essays covering his thoughts on doctors and health care services.
Ezekiel Emanuel’s website.
Ezekiel Emanuel’s 2014 article in The Atlantic (behind paywall).
Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on news show where he updates his position on how he manages his health care.
PDF of Montaigne’s collected essays (Project Gutenberg)

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your

Previous Episode

Heal Me: Childhood Trauma in The Who’s Tommy with Dr. Anthony Tobia

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When the British band, The Who, released their double album, Tommy, in 1969, many of the songs in it became instant classics and served as anthems for the Baby Boomer generation ever since. The album was characterized as a “rock opera,” because when connected, the songs told the story of the “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy. The storyline made possible subsequent musicals, first as a movie in 1975, and then as a Broadway play in 1993 and as a revival in 2024. Underlying the storyline in each of these genres are the psychiatric consequences of childhood trauma Tommy experiences. In this episode, we consider the psychiatric conditions Tommy exhibits through selected songs from the original Broadway production, and how they are used in education and training.
Joining us for this purpose is Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the regional chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine there. His interests and scholarly work include the value and application of merging popular culture and psychiatry. The Who’s Tommy is among the many cultural works he has found helpful in depicting psychiatric problems for purposes of teaching health professions students and practitioners, and others in roles helping people with mental illness.
Links:
Original Broadway cast album of The Who’s Tommy, 1993
Background on The Who’s Tommy movie, 1975.
The video of Dr. Tobia’s psychiatry grand rounds on the Phantom of the Opera mentioned in the podcast.
Reddit 31 Knights of Halloween didactic at Rutgers during October.
Thanks to Benedict Teagarden, podcast music and culture director, for pointers on how the harmonization in See Me, Feel Me contributes to the meaning of the lyrics.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Next Episode

Painting an Ideal: Luke Fildes’ The Doctor with Hannah Darvin

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The renowned English social realist and portrait painter, Luke Fildes (rhymes with “childs”), created The Doctor in 1891 after Henry Tate commissioned a painting from him for his new museum, the Tate Britain. The subject of the painting was Fildes’ choice. Despite a poor reception among art critics when it was first exhibited, the painting quickly became iconic as the physician ideal. Over its 133-year history, the painting has been used for a variety of purposes, including inspiration, education, propaganda, and politics. During that time, the ways in which the painting represents the physician ideal changed. We talk about these aspects of the painting with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She has conducted extensive research into the painting and its creator.
Links

Image of The Doctor from the Tate Britain Museum.
About Hannah Darvin at Queen’s University.
Hannah Darvin’s description of her research for the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
John Brewer Eberly’s diptych rendering a modern version of The Doctor in which computer technology is interjected between doctor and patient.

The next episode will feature opera and how as an art form it can render illnesses in ways that elaborate on bioscience texts and teachings. For examples, we will draw from two operas featuring female characters with tuberculosis (“consumptive heroines”), namely, La Traviata and La Bohème. Joining us will be Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, who have combined their expertise in comparative literature and medicine, respectively, with their love for opera into an expansive body of scholarly work making both opera and medicine more interesting and better appreciated.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.